


A Post-Modern Pygmalion

by bluemoonwings



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Mythology - Freeform, Pygmalion, Sculpture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 19:23:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5139644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoonwings/pseuds/bluemoonwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Their greatest asset is their greatest curse. They can never be seen. The loneliest creatures in the universe.”</p><p>The artist Pygmalion fell love with his creation, and the gods mercifully made Galatea real...but can stone ever learn to love?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Cynthia- I hope this inspires your own considerable creativity.
> 
> *
> 
> A story that came to me on my long drive home. I wondered what it would be like to explore consciousness and even love through the eyes of an untouchable Weeping Angel. Need this one, so close to death, be lonely for all eternity?

She was so damaged her very consciousness was transient in the void. She was swept this way and that, from past to future without any rhyme or reason, unable to control herself and tethered agonizingly to her body. She was not yet dead, but she was hardly alive. She was in-between, and this was the worst torture of all, unable even to scream much less move, or seek the companionship of her sisters.

Time made no sense when one was anchored thusly, a ship tied tenuously to a dock in a hurricane of events and sequences. She had no idea how many days, years, or even millenia had passed as she remained locked in a hell between waking and sleeping, living and dying.

One day, however, out of the innumerable that had passed or had yet to pass, she found herself again, fully, within the confines of her body. The relief of experiencing something different waned immediately when she realized that her precious physical form was grievously injured, so much that she could not move, could not cry out, and could not escape the gaze of life forms which further imprisoned her. Her mighty wings were broken, the left completely gone, and the right reduced to jagged feathers, a mere indication of what had once been a strong, flight-worthy limb. Her left arm was damaged, her hand, completely lost along with a chunk of her cheek, part of her eye, which she had been trying to hide with her hand, the corner of her mouth, and part of her chest. Her right hand was a mere stump, lacking fingers at all but for the littlest finger and part of a thumb, but her arm was relatively in place. The rich drapery of her robes had been worn away as if by sand, along with the hem. She was textureless, and thus, without identity or memory save for the meanest and most obtuse details, and stripped of all mobility.

Many more days passed, or maybe even years, she was not sure, before she realized that she could...see. It was not well formed, this vision, as her right eye was partially covered by the remains of her hand, and her left was essentially ruined. However, there was something warm against her. She was connected enough to her body to feel a little, and this helped her understand what was going on. There was a figure right up against her face, a warm female human, clutching her where stumps were supposed to be hands, and peering into her. She was too weak to care, much less hunger. The angel hoped in vain that perhaps the figure would smash her to indecipherable pieces and end this terrible sentence.

It was not to be. At first she thought the sounds she was hearing were the voices of her sisters, but no, it was much harsher and not so musical. Rather, it was not the same kind of music. It was the language of...what did they call themselves? Humans. And this creature, a rather small female, was speaking to her. She could not make out the words themselves. She was too weak to really hear, but her instincts told her that the touch was gentle and without malice, and that the human herself was a year's meal, perhaps. There was not much life force left in her, even if the angel could bring herself now to feed. A single Earthen year was not enough to even undo the lock on her body, much less allow her to call out. Demoralized, the angel let her mind drift in the abyss once more.

**

It was an angel all right, but not quite French, English, or even modern styling. It was white marble too, probably, and not at all gray as it had originally seemed to be. Many rounds of scrubbing and rinsing had revealed the purity beneath the grime of untold years. She seemed antique, Grecian even, but everything about her seemed very slightly anachronistic. The young human woman who stood before the angel frowned as she scrutinized every aspect of the statue. She was short for a descendant of the ancient Romans, but with the sun-touched olive skin, coal-black eyes, and hair to match. She wasn't beautiful, and had considered herself rather plain, but she had also never asked anyone else. Her name was Seraphina, and she was all alone with a strange stone angel.

Seraphina's grandfather had declared it an artistic fake when he had found it on his travels years before his death, and had never quite gotten around to restoring it as he had wished. Now, she visited this fragmentary angel where she had been installed in the local cemetery, watching over Seraphina's grandparents, parents, and other relatives.

“Watching over” was not quite right, as it was apparent to Seraphina that the angel had been hiding her face, perhaps in sorrow, or even in prayer. Curiously, Seraphina reached out now, touched the broken limbs, the smooth, sculpted cheekbones, subtle lids of damaged and dull eyes, and then the pursed, well-defined lips. Whoever had created her had been a master artisan. Seraphina doubted herself now, and frowned at the angel. It had been her intention to repair it using plaster and a weatherproofing clear compound that her grandfather's company had trademarked, but if her tools themselves were up for this challenge, Seraphina now worried about her own talents.

Still, it wasn't right for her dear grandfather's favorite statue to remain broken for all eternity. She would just start with the folds of the gown, she decided. She could certainly do that. The wings were also practically missing-- she could resculpt wings for the statue. The face and hands would wait for last. Until then, she would look at the statue's haunting face as a reminder to keep working.

She jumped down from the pedestal on which the angel had been mounted and opened her battered leather bound sketchbook. She pulled a charcoal pencil from behind her ear and sketched the scarring where she saw that folds of a long draping gown had been worn away as if by sand, and where she would add a few more to give the angel better balance and, perhaps, toes, peeking out. The whole bottom of the statue was missing, but she deduced the proportions and noted them. There was a lot to do, so she headed back to her studio to make preparations.

**

 

There was that same energy again, and a sound like cacophonous music to her senses. The creature felt herself stir and return from a dreamlike state to find herself again inside her body. Only, it wasn't the same. To say she felt more whole would be a stretch of the truth. A lie even. She wasn't healed. However, as her consciousness stretched within its boundaries, reconnecting little by little, she found that in fact she did have more matter, more volume, to her physical body. How this was possible she did not even have the energy to think about, but she was, at least in little ways, aware.

Warmth, unlike the cold and ancient stone of her form, touched her broken hands, and again, in her ruined face, was the same creature from before. Only this time, suddenly, the creature could see her. It seemed impossible, and she knew she hadn't regenerated herself. Her vision wasn't perfect, and with the creature looking right at her, she could not shift at all to focus or look anywhere but straight. However, as soon as the warm creature turned around to look in some kind of bucket, the angel could make out a little more. The girl returned, locking the angel up again, but only momentarily, for she knelt at the angel's base and did not look at her at all. What was she doing? She did not have the strength to move, but she could hear what the human could not. It was an odd composition of muttering and grunting with the tinny metal sound of wires being twisted and clipped. This went on for hours, she thought, as the unknown little human worked, got frustrated, undid her work, and redid it. Unable to really see anything, much less participate, the angel finally lost interest, or even the energy for interest, and she drifted into they abyss again.

**

 

Seraphina hit her stride this day after about four hours. She twisted the metal wires around and around under the remains of the skirt of the angel, into what would serve as feet. The armature had no details. It was just a skeleton until she crafted the details in plaster around it. She felt like she was being watched as she did this, so she looked up and imagined that the angel was supervising her through her battered left eye. “I'm trying, I promise,” Seraphina assured her, and stood again to look at her face closely. Some of the spackle she had applied a few days ago was chipping. This would not do.

She turned and mixed the cement-like material in her bucket with some water and a thick stirring rod. Anchoring the bucket between her feet, she used a great deal of leverage as the mixture thickened to a nearly solid consistency. She used a Spackle knife to apply the rapidly hardening compound to the metal frame. She would shave it down and carve it later, so she only needed to create a general shape, enough to chisel or sand into the correct image.

As this hardened, she dipped a palette knife not unlike what a painter might use, and applied some to the angel's battered eye, then to the side of her face where chunks had been lost, to her lips, which were also damaged, and the side of her head. It was chunky and gross, but it would look different when she was done. She let this all harden overnight, having wrapped the angel in a waterproof tarp against the weather.

The next morning, the angel seemed more still and lifeless than ever. Gone was the sensation of being watched. Seraphina forgot all about this as she worked. First, she began to sculpt the feet. Her grandfather's compound had cured as hard as real marble now, and she had to use a hammer and chisel. Her hands hurt after a few hours, so she stopped for the day with only very general outlines of feet and the indication of carved calves.

She coughed once, then twice, and the third time, there was some blood, so Seraphina packed her things, wrapped the angel up again, and did not return for quite some time.

**

 

“You're so beautiful,” came a voice in the darkness.

Her awareness had been dreaming of running with her sisters through the darkness of space, so fast, traversing galaxies and nebulae in the blink of an eye. Was this the past? The future? Fantasy? She had no way of knowing. Now, she was awake, and filling the crevices of her stone-like vessel again, and found herself quantum locked by the gaze of a living being. This time, it was not restrictive or unpleasant. It was familiar and nurturing. She felt stronger now, without any reason why, and she realized that she could see. She could feel. In fact, she could almost, maybe... move.

The leaves had turned from green to rich golds and reds around her. How long had it been that the strange little girl had worked on her in that queer little way.

“I haven't been working as much as I wanted,” said the human, who seemed to have been coughing so hard she was tearing up. “I've been really sick. I finished your face, though. Your feet and dress will be done before Christmas. I promise.”

The creature's ambivalence was perhaps evident in her silence. She listened instead, paused inexorably in this moment with a tiny human female, who coughed and curled up against her skirts, which she realized was crafted somewhat, into flowing—as if moving-- folds and waves. Presently, the girl rose up onto a low footstool, grasping again her absent fingers to peer into her cold, marble-like face.

“You're my only friend right now. My only family,” the girl told her with an emptiness and sadness that the angel felt in the depths of her being. “When I look at you, I think of my grandpa. I wonder what it's like to be like you. You'll live forever.”

The irony was not lost on the angel, though she felt her consciousness swirling, gradually coming untethered. She struggled, though, in a faint way, to remain present. She reached out her mind, tried to touch the source of her power, and perhaps connect it to this human before her. She lacked the energy to feed. That had not changed, but what little there was of her was startled to detect so little life force now in this human. A wisp of wonder swirled within her mind if maybe she simply detected less because she was so weak herself, but another part of her doubted this very much.

“I should give you a name,” the human was saying, and the angel perked up unnoticably, for she did have a name of her own, in a language this mere mortal could not even hear much less conceptualize in all its picturesque glory. However, now having slightly more structure and form gave her enough energy to just barely desire. The most basic desire was all that now occurred to her-- the desire for identity. If an arbitrary designation could be given to her, it would be enough for now.

“Galatea,” the girl said to her. “It's from myth. A statue so beautiful and lifelike that she became real. Isn't that wonderful? You are fair like she was, and when I am done with you, I will give you a new life.” There was coughing now, and some blood spattered on Galatea's static forearms. The girl hastily wiped it away and then hastily began sanding near her face where an ear had been intricately chiseled, and an errant curl of hair had been shaped. “My name is Seraphina, in case you were wondering.”

She had not been, but the knowledge was not unwelcome. She let herself drift back into the strange swirling sleep that mixed time and fantasy, all the while listening to the soft noises of Seraphina's tools, and the sound of her voice. She grew accustomed to the vibration of the file whizzing too and fro, this way and that, or the clinking noise of chiseling; metal touching metal before metal touching stone, and the soft crumble of this strange material as it broke away in controlled bits like real marble. She even grew used to the curse words Seraphina uttered when she made mistakes and had to recast, reshape, or remake things.

True to her word, however, by the time the first snow fell, about two weeks before Christmas (according to Seraphina), Galatea did have a full gown that fell in luxurious waves to the ground and over her feet which were delicate and bare, poking out from beneath the hem. She even had toenails.

Her face was whole again, and she could see all the time. She could still do next to nothing, which was frustrating to her, but she now had something that she had completely lost in her time before Seraphina. Hope. Hope that she might live and fly with her sisters once more. Hope that her eternity still belonged to her and would not end in isolation and ruin on a planet where she was either unknown or hated.

She still did not have wings or hands, but she saw her face now in the reflection of Seraphina's jet black eyes. She was whole once more, symmetrical, defined, and perhaps even less severe than she had originally been, a softness having been sculpted into her face. She knew, because Seraphina had spoken aloud, that she seemed slightly disproportional, and thus, had been altered to seem more “lifelike.” A further addition to the chunk that had been missing on her upper chest, was now an image of a crowned heart with a cross, perhaps to solidify her within Seraphina's native iconography. While this seemed wholly unnecessary to Galatea, she now had the capacity to understand the young artist's limitations. She had no idea that she was basically identical to sisters of her power level and age, at least in theory. She had no idea that if given enough time, Galatea would shape herself and camouflage her appearance. Yes, all of this embellishment was unnecessary, but somehow, Galatea could feel her “self” absorb into all these new, prosthetic additions. They were not quite like her original body, she knew for sure, but they were not only cosmetic. In fact, as her energy gradually restored, like an eyedropper compared to the ocean she once had been, she felt herself change her new body and assimilate it fairly naturally.

“Your wings will be crafted from marble,” Seraphina was saying. Galatea did not know how long her uncontrollable thoughts had wandered, but this interested her immensely. “I will mount them with metal onto your...stumps... and seal the joints. No one will know, but it will take me awhile. Please be patient.”

The angel could be nothing if not patient, but there was still a swatch of emotion in the untold recesses of her self that was unhappy when finally Seraphina spread the blue waterproof tarp over her, and secured it with ropes like manacles around her body for the winter.

She slept again, this time, dreaming in a much more linear fashion, of coal black eyes and rough, warm, dexterous hands or clean, hard tools. She dreamed of voices, those of her sisters and that of this little moth of an artist who sought to repair her, unaware of the danger Galatea posed not only to her but all of her race. _If she knew, would she then destroy me?_ Galatea wondered idly, her consciousness having taken more consistency and energy as of late. _Would she swing that great mallet and smash me to pieces?_ Surely. But that wouldn't be her fault. Humans lived for only a moment compared to her. It would be unfair to expect any larger perspective.

She was pondering this when other voices shook her from her contemplation. She might have imagined it, and was about to ignore it and return to sleep when suddenly the ties loosened all at once and the tarp was ripped from her head, catching on a curl of hair on the side of her head, and snapping the very tip away. It was acutely painful in a weird way. Creatures like her did not feel pain exactly, but they did suffer when their consciousness was forced to divorce itself from any part of their physical form.

She was locked, but they stood before her so she saw them quite clearly, youths about Seraphina's age, bundled up against the cold she could not herself feel, making rude gestures and comments about her bare arms and neck. One or two were wearing strangely flaccid conical red felt hats trimmed with white synthetic fur. They were laughing and pelting one another with grimy snow and treading carelessly upon headstones and wilted flowers from various loved ones. These were of no consequence to her of course, but Galatea was offended at having been shaken out of reverie now, as she was too weak to react physically, but distracted enough to find herself even vaguely present. It took her by surprise, of course, when the first beer bottle shattered against her lovingly remodeled face.

A male human whooped and cheered like a monkey and another one climbed her pedestal and kicked the remains of one broken wing. Another pitched a dirty snowball at her, laughing and jeering all the way. These were not kind sounds like Seraphina's, but crude, ugly noises of animals, hardly more than grunting and gurgling. It was only when one began to draw on her cheek with an alcohol-based felt pen that Galatea became aware of another sound.

It was the sound of Seraphina screaming. As the boys turned as one to look at her, and as her gaze was fixed on them, the angel adjusted her gaze very slightly. She could not move, but her focus did shift enough to make out Seraphina now charging at the youths, a scarlet scarf flapping behind her, and a shapeless hat flying off her head to free her raven hair. She was brandishing, of all things, a large hammer, and at her belt, a long, tapered chisel hung. Something inside the angel made a jump as if she too were about to join the action. Of course, she could not, but she remembered what it was like to take life, and as she watched the little artist run up with fire in her eyes, she was inexplicably stirred.

She was not a fighter, at least that her physical body allowed. The boys made some distance between her and her weapons, allowing her to come to a standing position in front of where Galatea stood, but soon realized that they could easily overpower her, and here their bravado returned. Seraphina was serious, and clipped one boy in the arm with the back swing of her hammer. He howled with the crunch of one of this arm bones, and ran a few feet away before collapsing in the snow. One of his friends went to help him. The largest boy, however, rushed Seraphina and threw her to the ground, her hammer falling away from her grasp, and her head dashed rather hard against Galatea's feet. He was drunk with intoxicants and rage at having his fun ruined and his manhood questioned by a sickly little artist girl, and he flung insults of all kinds at her while he strangled her and pulled her hair.

Another boy came up behind him. To help him or caution him, no one would ever know, for it was then that everyone looked away. One boy was fixated on his arm, and his friend on him. One boy approached the leader who was assaulting Seraphina, and the artist herself had her eyes closed shut as she screamed bloody murder for help.

If ever she reflected on this moment, the creature known to Seraphina as Galatea, might have said that it was because she knew she needed to be repaired. Her sisters would have teased her for even this much sentimentality, but would have respected her for securing a meal even in such dire straights. Surely they would have expected her to consume Seraphina's time as soon as she was complete, and surely Galatea had no reason to feel any differently. Yet suddenly, as she heard Seraphina's shrill and passionate cries fall eerily silent, and the quantum lock momentarily release, she felt in her cosmic depths, enough presence to do what it was that a Weeping Angel does.

It was only a moment's lapse in attention, but that was all she needed. It was just enough that when the lock was restored, because the boys looked up, they did not see a sorrowful or pious icon anymore. She bared her fangs and twisted her face like a demon's, and when they all looked at one another for just a heartbeat, taking their eyes off of her once again, she surged forward. They turned back to look at her as they ran, but it was too late. Her sole finger extended as she reached forth... and like a light, the boy who gripped an unconscious Seraphina in his cold, knobby hands, only managed a fraction of a scream before he snuffed out and vanished.

**

Seraphina woke up wrapped in a blue waterproof tarp as her only protection against the frozen, wet ground. The cemetery was utterly dark but for the light of the moon and her flashlight, which she had dropped when she'd tried to run off those drunk assholes. Her whole body hurt and she felt the worn ligature marks around her throat where she had been choked, as well as the goose egg that was forming on the back of her head. She struggled to rise, failed once, but made it to her knees, and then her feet on her second try, gripping the folds of Galatea's gown for support. Startled and coming to her senses, she looked up and frantically searched the angel for any signs of damage, but there were none at all save for a tiny chip of hair, and half a bottle of beer spilled over her front.

“I'm sorry,” Seraphina murmured, coughing into her gloved hands before wiping Galatea clean with her own scarf, “I didn't think they would ever... I mean... this is a holy place for Chrissakes, Galatea.” She impulsively, lovingly, kissed the cold stone brow, cheek, and lips as if she were a beloved family member . “I'm sorry I let them hurt you.”

The angel was of course silent, but she read (or perhaps simply imagined) capitulation in this, and went a few steps away to sit beside the headstone that belonged to her grandfather and grandmother. She gazed down at the smooth hewn marble which had been gilded somewhat to create more contrast. She did not realize that the angel had turned ever-so-slightly away from her hands to regard her out of the corner of her eye, and so had no idea how taxing it was to do so. Even a whole human life had not been enough to restore Galatea appreciably, except in consciousness and judicious, painful, shifting. She had no idea as she dissolved into crying for her loneliness and misery and grief over having no living family, that the angel felt herself instinctively understand.

Galatea had no way of knowing that it was Christmas Eve.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**

It seemed to Galatea the angel that as Seraphina's spirits rose in the coming month, her body weakened somewhat. Being a statue, she was privy to musings and confessions that Seraphina kept private in the rest of her life. She learned that she was a teacher of art at the local high school, that she lived alone and had no lifemate nor family. She learned that Seraphina was barely twenty three and ailing from a mysterious sickness that no one seemed to have any idea as to how to cure. She knew then, in late January, that Seraphina would not last till next Christmas, and had devoted herself to Galatea's repair as a last promise kept to her late grandfather, and so that she would have a place to be buried herself.

For a distinctly unsentimental creature like this Weeping Angel, Galatea found all of this ritual to be curious and unnecessary, but could not wholly divorce herself from the tragedy of it all. This loneliness winding its way to the inevitable end. While she was being repaired and would one day escape, and desert the burial ground that Seraphina so desired to have beautified, she herself was making the same trip in reverse.

She was already different, Galatea realized within her silent body. She had been altered in little ways to be more aligned to Seraphina's aesthetics and ideas, and along with this had come strange feelings and concepts. She had command of her memories now, and they were not quite as future-savy as before, even though she had once moved backward and forward through time, at least mentally, with nary a snag. Before her now were some future memories-- that is memories her future self had already made-- and contained within were visions of her sisters, but beyond that was a cloudy haze of black space. In solitude she wondered what it could mean, but never dwelled on it long; it wasn't her way.

 

**

It had taken Seraphina at least two tries now, and that had set her back several weeks. She referred for the hundredth time to her sketchbook on page 50, where she had drawn a realistic rendition of Galatea in her original condition, and used sheer wax paper to superimpose revisions and additions like these wings she was trying to craft.

They would not balance, she realized early on. They could not support their own weight and would tip Galatea off balance if thrown back the way her stumps indicated they should be. Also, they were terribly intricate, and full of movement. The only way for her to preserve both the detail needed and the dynamic posture was to give her something new and a little different. She sketched out lines on the white stone with charcoal to serve as guides. Once she began to work, she would need to commit to her carving. No mistakes could be made. She raised the large chisel and mallet and set the edge of the tool against the stone. Her right hand raised and came down like the sound of a gong.

**

The angel could not see, but was immediately alarmed at the sound of humans who were not Seraphina. She had been dormant but these days she never ventured far from her body, and had immediately come awake, quantum locked by many gazes. She felt the vibration of a motor vehicle, a truck, approach her slowly from behind, and before her stood two young men. Remembering the last ones who had deigned to lay hands on her, she was greatly displeased and wished she could hide her face behind her missing limbs.

One of the young men had sandy, shaggy blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. He was almost as tall as she was, even mounted on a pedestal, and lanky. Clad in beat up gray trainers, frayed denim jeans, and a thick hoodie, his appearance told her that it was no longer the dead of winter. Her thoughts drifted back to the last time she had seen Seraphina, when she had fought so bravely, but been so cold. It had taken all of her strength just to attack that boy. It was a gamble that her sisters would not have approved of. She could have used up the very depths of her lifeforce and fully destroyed herself. As it was, the twenty or so years she had consumed from him had been largely used up just in wrapping Seraphina and returning to her place. If the artist had ever noticed that her head now canted very slightly toward her grandparents' graves, she had never indicated so.

“She's got a gift for you,” the second young man said to her, returning her instantly to the present. This one had black hair like Seraphina, but was pale with eyes as blue as the sky above them. He was dressed similarly to his friend, but different colors, and he wore gloves. “She wanted to bring them over before the snow ended but there was no way she was going to lift them herself.”

They weren't talking to her exactly. Galatea knew this, but she found the words useful in ascertaining the threat level. These were not the punks of Christmastime but rather, Seraphina's friends, a bit younger than her, and very healthy and strong. Many years rested within them. If she consumed both...

“Easy now,” came Seraphina's voice, which captured her attention and banished any thoughts of eating the two boys. The was a light impact, like a gentle swing of a pendulum, and then again, and there were shrieks of a metal drill bit against her stone skin. Galatea was paralyzed but immediately frightened. What were they doing? The two boys in front of her reached up around her neck and grasped something together, holding it steady behind her as the shrieking and unpleasant grinding continued for several minutes while Seraphina growled, snarled orders, and whispered to nonsensically to her.

At last, she was free again, and felt...heavier than ever before. They had attached something foreign and her consciousness was at first unable, or hesitant, to try to fill it, but suddenly, she realized that she could feel it. This was... it couldn't be. They were so different and yet as she felt four humans, Seraphina, an unseen friend, and the two boys work on cleaning her and perfecting their addition, the whole contraption began to feel much more natural. She could have wept for real in that moment had she been alone, for it had been an immeasurably long time since she had felt even vaguely whole. If her missing hands, her facial protection, had ever really bothered her primarily, this was no longer the case. Now she had no real need of hands she realized, for she could accomplish so much with these... these strong, and life-filled wings.

She saw Seraphina now, having somehow climbed up over them to peek over her shoulder, and then, with unlikely vitality, jump over her shoulder to stand on her pedestal before Galatea with her arms around her broken ones for support. Earnestly, they gazed at one another, though Seraphina had no idea, and she said, “I hope you will be satisfied with these, Galatea. I had to use some metal to secure them, but we have covered all the joints with this mortar. I'll shape it when it is all cured and I think no one will ever realize they aren't your natural wings.” Pleased with herself, the girl rested her cheek against one of Galatea's arms and closed her eyes. For one reason or another, her friends all happened to look away together, just for an instant, and the angel twitched, unnoticed.

They were more than just satisfactory. In time, they would grow as her own, as her life force gathered it and converted it. The metal would be absorbed easily, and the prosthetic would become authentic. It might take a hundred years if she didn't feed, but it would happen. It would be a blink in the face of eternity that she would spend, rejoined to her sisters.

She wished she could say thank you, but her kind did not have words for gratitude, predators that they were. She settled for this stolen moment with an innocent child of mortality, clutching her, warm and soft.

The last companion revealed herself at last, a chubby woman about Seraphina's age with wild red hair staging a mutiny from beneath a knit cap, and a winsome smile. “You're obsessed with this statue, girl. You really need to get some rest.”

Seraphina looked up. “Tomorrow, I need to begin work on her hands.”

The boys both looked uneasy. “Look, Sera,” the blonde one said, “you're an amazing artist. You need to pace yourself though, or you're going to...”

“What?” snarled Seraphina with more darkness and underlying rage than Galatea would have imagined she could have ever mustered, “Die? I'm dying anyway. I need to finish this...” she turned back to gingerly touch the fracture line of Galatea's left arm.

There was more arguing, more heated exchanges of words and wild gesticulating, but Galatea felt herself withdraw. Her focus was not what it once was, and she found it hard to concentrate. Now, her mind was examining her new wings. There were not only two anymore, folded downward, with mere outlines of feathers, but four, not unlike the arrangement of a butterfly, sweeping upward and forward as if to beat down and propel her into the sky, every spine on every feather independently carved in perfect contrast to every one of its mates. She had long feathers for steering, short feathers from maneuvering, and even the indication of soft pummels like an owl's, which would silence her flight. Not that she would ever need that of course.

In the end, Seraphina did not leave with her friends, and Galatea watched them bring the truck around the front of the cemetery. They tried one more time to get her to go with them, and silently the angel urged the girl to do so. She would be safer with beings like her who would care for her. It was not good for one to be alone. In this moment she observed the large homemade winch they had constructed to lift her heavy wings into place, and admired as if for the first time, the simple genius of these lifeforms.

But now, Seraphina was alone, and Galatea had a strange indication that it was perhaps her fault, though her kind was as prone to guilt as they were to sentimentality. The fact that this even occurred to her was puzzling, and she worried with it in her mind as Seraphina hid her face and cried at her feet. It would have been too poetic to blame her newfound emotion on the installation of finer wings, or this strange heart and cross over her chest, or even the repair and faint restructure of her face, but Galatea could not imagine anything else. She was not an imaginative creature anymore. Perhaps her race had been, and perhaps she as well, at the dawn of time. Now, with the temporal ocean stretching out around her like open space, her kind had no need for imagination-- they had experience. Maybe it was her memory loss, but she had no experience to draw from, and so imagination took its place, and with it, a vague poetic pondering.

Her people were a proud race, the first that had come forth when time had been born, and the first to not only traverse but manipulate its vortex, and had been changed irrevocably. Those Gallifreyans, Time Lords, as they called themselves, had come generations later, and yes, had managed much more success due in no small part to their symbiotic relationship with another time-traveling race of consciousness they had so vainly and unimaginatively named TARDIS.

But her people had come first. So ancient that they mimicked living stone art, they had no need for permanent bodies. Like hermit crabs, they could inhabit anything with their image, they had found, and even change their image with enough power...with enough _time_. They were nigh eternal, and even erosion and starvation could not truly kill them. All it would take to create another of herself, nearly identical, would be a passable replication of her image. Messy mortal concepts like mating were of great disgust to her people, and even willful reproduction happened very rarely. It was unnecessary for true immortals to breed regularly.

And yet, if genesis belonged to that which stood outside of time and space itself, then how was it now that the most space/time-vulnerable creature she had ever met had been responsible for such a passable improvement upon her image, and thus, her regeneration and subsequent evolution? It wasn't about the material itself; she could have used thick mud clay. There was something more. She had no idea that while the explanation for her current condition depended largely on Seraphina's prodigious talent, that it had much to do with herself as well.

She continued to ponder this in the days and weeks that followed, as Seraphina visited both Galatea and her family members' memorials. She wished she could ask questions in a way that Seraphina could understand as the artist traced, sketched, and tried to fit prototype fingers onto her damaged right hand. She failed a few times before she got all of them correct, and adhered them with a strong industrial adhesive that she sanded intensely and covered with a white matte paint.

The silence had grown lonely for her, Galatea surmised, for she began to lay her phone at her stone feet and listen to Internet radio while she worked long hours after work and both days of the weekend, sometimes coughing or shivering, but other times seeming as normal as any other mortal who visited the old cemetery during the day.

During the nights, hobos occasionally camped beneath the rising wings of the stone angel, which Galatea took no offense to and did not accost them out of respect for the human who so devotedly tended to her. However, on the rare occasion that one smoked and repeatedly extinguished his cigarettes upon the stone of the feet that Seraphina had so expertly designed, or if one had the audacity to relieve himself upon her base...well, those were never seen again, at least not in present day. Galatea found herself growing, slowly, infinitesimally, stronger. She had feet, a full gown, and glorious wings in addition to a fixed face and a strong right hand. Soon, she would escape this world and cross the sea of stars.

**


	3. Chapter 3

Seraphina's days were numbered and she knew it, so finally on the last day of spring, she set her phone down at Galatea's feet, playing a random instrumental mix from iTunes, as she affixed her final touch on the statue's renovations. It was Galatea's new left hand, a mirror of her right, and measured to anal retentive perfection. She showed it to the statue who of course stared straight through her. “I signed my name on your palm, see? But no one will know, so it won't take away from your beauty, Galatea. Um, I also wrote your name. If you ever lose this hand, I hope it will be returned to you.” She displayed the carefully chiseled names on the outstretched palm as if sheepish, but inside she was a little proud of her accomplishments.

A coughing fit wracked her as she bent to refer to one of the last pages of her worn sketchbook where a nearly complete image of Galatea had been detailed in lifelike realism. Blood spattered onto the page, just a little, and a little onto the inscription of the palm. She didn't have much time left. She was terribly anemic and the doctor had warned her that she needed rest and probably another transfusion.

“My own blood is poison, Galatea,” Seraphina informed her, pathetically as she shakily rose to her level and began to mount the hand. She had forgotten to wipe the blood in her rush to finish her work before her energy deserted her. “You're so lucky. You get to live forever now...and I... I suppose we'll never meet again after I die. Do statues have souls? You've been my closest friend this past year, though I guess that just means I need better hobbies, ha.” She barked out a weak laugh that sounded artificial.

“Love you, Galatea. Please be strong,” she whispered to the stone hands, so delicate and fair. She looked down toward where her grandparents were memorialized. “Watch over me okay?” There were tears in her eyes, and she had no more energy to cry them, so they simply hovered.

It was then that she realized her phone was spitting out no more music but instead static. She reached down as if to grab and look at it when it began to play again. It was not from the playlist she had selected though. Now, her phone played the theme from Zeffirelli's _Romeo and Juliet_ , which she had always loved but had rarely listened to recently. Curious, she picked up her phone again, and suddenly her phone continued its original selection of instrumental classical music. “Are you dying too?” she chuckled wryly, tapping the touch screen gently. She looked up at Galatea's stoic face. “I'll be back later to smooth out that wrist again, but you're pretty much done now, Beautiful. Are you happy?”

Of course there was silence, but it felt merry to Seraphina who now had the energy to rise just and make her way home to rest as her doctor had wished. She was not able to stay true to her word, and was too weak to work on Galatea for many weeks. When she did return, however, nothing would be the same.

In her absence, she dreamed of the powerful angel flying into the heavens, aided and embraced by others, just as beautiful but not as strong or majestic as her angel. In her dreams, there were many like Galatea had been, with simpler design, and less distinctiveness, like an army of clones. In her dreams, Galatea was now their leader, a mighty archangel who flew better, higher, stronger than all of them, and commanded their utmost respect. Together they burned worlds of sickness and sin and consumed the light of suns many times brighter than Earth's. Yet, always, in her dreams, Galatea returned to her, where she slept silently beneath the warm soil, and watched over her.

It was in midsummer that she was awakened by the tinny alarm sound on her phone, her thoughts still a blur of wondering if she should make Galatea a lance to carry or not, and of stone angels who reached out with clawed fingers. A quick read of the alert had her out of bed at once.

**

 

Galatea's consciousness had once again come slightly unanchored and had drifted in a dreamy soup that was filled with the sight, sound, and feel of Seraphina and countless worlds, teeming with life, when she awakened. Before her now was one of her sisters, a weaker one, with her arm thrown over her eyes to stop from looking at Galatea, but locked herself by Galatea's sight. Immediately, she turned her own head upward so that her sister could move, which she did, looping one arm around one of Galatea's without looking, and another sister did the same, also looking away.

But at once, before they could flee this Terran world, and hunt. All three of them were quantum locked by a single gaze. She felt her sisters hiss inside their stony shells, furious. In a blink, Galatea turned her head back down before them, and was again frozen, but now looking at their captor.

Seraphina stood there, barefoot in the dew-damp grass, wearing only a thin white t-shirt and faded purple leggings with a hole on one knee, as if she had run from bed. Her hair was disheveled and hung over her shoulders and chest like black brushstroked. Her eyes were black as the night itself, but full of a foreign emotion. Her heart was pounding and she was struggling to catch her breath.

“Don't look at me like that,” she shouted at Galatea, who had no choice but to continue looking at her however she was, for she could not move. Her gait was halting and weak, which startled Galatea greatly. Her sisters, hearing this, expressed disdain. This wasn't even worth a meal. This human had weeks if not days to live. She had no time for them to eat. She was practically dead already.

“I know what you are. I didn't always know, but when I looked for images of your original form, I saw the stories. All the pictures of you with black lines through it to distort the image. All the stupid things people say about how your very picture can become alive-- it's all true isn't it? My friends thought I was crazy when I installed a heat-sensitive motion detector on that tree behind you. I knew one day you would move enough to trigger it. I knew one day your people would come for you. It's true. I knew it.” She showed Galatea a Google image search which yielded many intentionally distorted or incomplete pictures of many of her sisters, and even one of Galatea herself from many years ago. Galatea herself could not confirm or deny any of it though, locked as she was in Seraphina's unblinking stare.

“You eat time, I know this,” Seraphina set her jaw and looked at her in an accusing way that Galatea did not particularly enjoy. “So I ask you...can you do that to me? Can you...send me back? Give me a peaceful life?” She seemed to realize that Galatea could no more answer her than escape with her eyes open, so suddenly, deliberately, she shut her eyes and opened them.

Immediately there were now three angels surrounding her, boxing her in, all averting their gazes from one another but two on either side of her gripping her wrists. The one behind her, she could not see, but could feel her curved fingers beside her head. Then there was Galatea who stood motionless, closer now, as if she had walked, her face looking open and bewildered, her hands now palms-out, as if to say “no.” One hand gripped now Seraphina's phone. She looked down in surprise but it was really gone.

“You...”

 _You have no time. When we met you did not even have a year_ , came a halting static-filled voice from the device, as if pieced together from sound bytes of songs stored on the device, a disconcerting mishmash of voices as one.

“Then...” Seraphina looked around at the angels who gripped her, and did not look even a little afraid. “Can you just...kill me?”

 _Easy...Of course...even...a day... will let...you feed...again..._ This time the voices were a little different, less distinct, and less in control. They were the voices of her sisters manipulating the device now. _Kill...the...human. We ...can...do it..._ they told Galatea.

In a blink, Galatea with her four great wings, was even closer to the human, boxing her in with the other three, looking only at her. She was locked now, and even now deliberated. It did not make sense to feed on a single dying human, but her sisters would tolerate no witnesses. She knew this and now she could not back away.

Seraphina's eyes were so deep and pregnant with a melancholy that Galatea could not even begin to comprehend, but had briefly tasted in the eternity before she had been repaired. Tears that she as an angel could never cry ran down the human's soft cheeks. And finally, as if heavy, the lids closed.

**

It was the sudden release of the hands on her wrist that made Seraphina open her eyes, only to find the two angels silently shrieking with twisted demonic faces, as their white marble-like skin faded to ashen gray and finally black before they disintegrated into dust altogether. Stretched out as if she had touched them, was her Galatea, her eyes now lowered looking at a place just to the side of Seraphina's face, but her mouth set in a grimace of effort, her stone muscles bunched up and tense with exertion, and her hands like claws that had punctured the skin of her sisters.

Now she was locked, Seraphina realized, recalling the stories, but she was probably also locking the angel behind her. Tentatively, with great anxiety, she turned as well, and jumped with fright at the ghoulish, snarling face of the angel who had once been so serene but was now roaring at her with terrible sharp teeth and gargoyle-like grimace. She was staring straight at Galatea. They had locked each other, Seraphina realized. Now would be the perfect moment to escape. A saner person would have. A saner person would return with dynamite and blow both statuesque creatures to high heaven while they were suspended.

Seraphina was not this sane person. She was a dying, lonely human. If Galatea would kill her, so be it. That would be good, in fact, for she had found herself, perhaps in great mental sickness, in love with the beautiful angel. Her only friend. Her confidante. Her muse. Her patient. She didn't hesitate to reach up with both her hands and cover the eyes of the aggressive angel just before she closed her own.

There was a shriek in her phone before the stone face beneath her hands also disintegrated into dust and chunks of gravel, and standing in its wake, now frozen instead by Seraphina's eyes, was Galatea, in profile, wings out toward the sky, looking slightly away, her face a mask of great grief as if wailing.

 _Now I too am alone_ , came the voice in her phone, still clutched in Galatea's hand, _I cannot live among my sisters again after having stolen the life force of my own kind_.

“You have me,” Seraphina whispered, reaching up to stroke her angel's cheek. She was shorter now that she was not standing atop a tall marble step.

 _And when you are gone, my loneliness will be eternal_ , came the sad voice of the angel, again an amalgamation of other voices. _I will be alone and hated, and hunted forever._

“You didn't...have to...kill me now, Galatea. No one will know.” Seraphina found herself pleading. “They'll forgive you.” She blinked and now the angel looked right at her, her face so heartbroken, and yet with a hand reached out as if to wipe away her tears. Seraphina bit her lip and shut her eyes now, for a long time.

What she felt defied description. The simple way to describe it would be an embrace, but it was both hard, and immaterial as mist, for the angel moved often so fast that she could not process her motion before she was doing something else. It was definitely an embrace though, and the feeling of hard, unyielding, cold lips upon her own, as gently as a feather falls to Earth.

“Do what you wish to me, Galatea. My life is yours.”

 _Don't say that, Seraphina_. There _were_ hard, stone fingers in her hair, and against her neck—not violent, but stroking and caressing. And now there they were in the soft fabric of her clothes. _I am your creation. You are my...deity. My kind...have not had gods...since the beginning_.

“I am only human.”

 _No...not anymore_. Came the mysterious response, suddenly in her mind, and not weirdly disembodied through her phone. The touch was now a little forceful in a way the frightened Seraphina, and she opened her eyes without meaning to, to find Galatea frozen in the act of laying her great stone head against her heart, as if listening to it. She blinked and their lips were together. She did again and found herself in a cold, but strong stone embrace. Finally she closed her eyes again, and Galatea's hands gathered in her shirt.

The tearing noise was the only sound that the silent angel ever made before Seraphina stood bare in the moonlight. “Galatea--”

But she was met with that rapid swirling indication of motion and vibration all over her skin, coaxing its way into her hair and lips, upon fingernails and toes, over her breasts and even lightly over secret places that no one had ever seen. She sighed as if massaged, but wanting something she could not even understand enough to ask for. Then their hands met between them, fingertips touching, soft and hard, and infinitely more intimate than any touch or even kiss.

_You saved my life. In return, my eternity...is yours._

“What--” Seraphina's eyes flew open but it was too late. Galatea's beautiful, gentle face faded away with her gentle fingers and powerful archangel wings, each tiny piece of her reducing now to glowing moonlit embers as she disintegrated as her sisters had before her. All that was left in the cemetery now was a girl, cloaked in dappling of shadows and moonlight, with long silver hair and luminous, nearly colorless skin, like fine china. And when she reached forward to grab at the powder that had once combined form with the soul of her beloved angel, had one seen her, they would have seen that her eyes were no longer coal black which had so entranced Galatea, but silver like starlight.

The creature who had once been Seraphina and was now somewhat something else looked around as the hair on the back of her neck pricked up. There, along the treeline, trying to hide, were more of them. Weeping Angels. Ancient matriarchs and predators of Time.

Strangely, no more fear accompanied her as she swirled the dust in her hand around herself, her eyes never leaving them. At once, she wore a wrapped white shawl over her bare form, and shaped it with her will-- stolen energy from three healthy angels, along with Galatea's, until she had clothed herself in thick robes as well. She blinked, but they did not advance, for so afraid were they of her cold silver eyes.

There was nothing more to do now, she decided. Her old life was over and it would not do to dwell upon it. She looked away from the angels, took a deep breath, and in a blink, vanished from sight.

 

**

The townspeople looked high and low for Seraphina the artist. They were bewildered to find the cemetery vandalized and her family's prized angel statue stolen, and perhaps damaged severely, given the fine dust all over the grass.

At last, they managed to get the Sheriff to open her small apartment which was crammed from wall to wall with art supplies from her grandfather's company. It was a wonder she had ever had room to eat or sleep when she had worked on pieces for the county art shows or for her students.

There was no sign of a struggle, nor any indication that she had left town, for her clothes and shoes remained. Also, upon her desk, they found her sketchbook, which she never left about. It was filled with her work on the angel statue's restoration. They pored over it looking for clues, until they got to the last pages where she had made notations in self-imposed margins, but for some reason had never written in the middle of the page. There was a little bit of blood here and there, as if she had coughed upon it, and careful scrutiny revealed that there was something here, as if she had laid an object across the page.

They questioned her friends and students who all agreed that she had drawn a complete, detailed rendition of the finished angel statue upon this page. They had all see in not days before her disappearance. However, to everyone's great bewilderment, the page, aside from notes and a bit of dried blood, was totally blank.  


End file.
